An Interactive Map That Makes Sense of Reddit’s Sprawl

Dr. Zachary Neal and Randy Olson, two researchers from Michigan State University, created Redditviz, an interactive map of the sprawling community. Image: Redditviz

Type in “Star Wars” and you’ll see other flourishing subreddits of a similar stripe: Batman, comic books, LEGO, Star Trek, cosplay. If you like “engineering porn,” you might also like “Artisan videos,” “Ask Engineers,” “CNC,” “Machine porn,” and “metalworking.” Image: Redditviz

"I concluded that one of the major design flaws in Reddit is that it does not easily facilitate new users finding the smaller, more specific subreddits that are better suited to their interests than the generic, default subreddits," says Olson. Image: Redditviz

The researchers relied on 8 months of user data; when people posted at a certain frequency in two different subreddits, they were linked on the map. Image: Redditviz

There is, Olson admits, an “enormous porn cluster”—and also a sizable, tight-knit one dedicated to My Little Pony—but there’s also hives of activity around music production, beer crafting, LGBT rights, hollywood starlets and current events. Not that scummy after all. Image: Redditviz

For me, Reddit brings to mind Obi Wan’s enduring description of the Mos Eisley cantina: a wretched hive of scum and villainy. But, you know, one you still kinda want to hang out in occasionally. The thing is, though, Reddit isn’t some obscure dive bar in a remote corner of the universe—it’s a huge watering hole at the very center of it. The site had some 400 million unique visitors in 2012. They can’t all be Greedos. So maybe my problem is just that I’ve never been able to find the places where the decent people hang out.

That’s what led Dr. Zachary Neal and Randy Olson, two researchers from Michigan State University, to create Redditviz. It’s an interactive map that taps into user posting patterns to surface subreddits you might be interested in. In other words—your guide to the vast Reddit universe. Type in “Star Wars” and you’ll see other flourishing subreddits of a similar stripe: Batman, comic books, LEGO, Star Trek, cosplay. If you like “engineering porn,” you might also like “Artisan videos,” “Ask Engineers,” “CNC,” “Machine porn,” and “metalworking.”

Redditviz is a new way to visualize the sprawling network that is Reddit. Image: Redditviz

There is, Olson admits, an “enormous porn cluster.”

The project was born out of a common Reddit frustration: the impenetrable home page. Instead of serving as a portal to the site’s many subcategories, it spits out an aggregated list of the site’s most popular—and often most asinine—content. Olson had just finished researching the site’s evolution when he zeroed in on the problem. “I concluded that one of the major design flaws in Reddit is that it does not easily facilitate new users finding the smaller, more specific subreddits that are better suited to their interests than the generic, default subreddits.”

He and Dr. Neal developed algorithms to map that complex subreddit network. They spent 8 months gathering data from Reddit about where users post and how often they posted there. When they saw significant numbers of users posting in two different subreddits, they plotted a link on their map. “For example, if the same 1,000 people regularly post to /r/beer and /r/fantasyfootball, we would take that as a hint that the two subreddits are highly related and create a link between them,” Olson says.

The resulting map proves that Reddit isn’t a “single, homogenous entity like the news articles often portray it,” Olson says. Rather, it’s “composed of an enormous and diverse group of people that are brought together by thousands of seemingly-unrelated interests.” In other words, there are plenty of communities that aren’t overrun by porn-obsessives and the internet vigilantes who were trying to find the Boston marathon bombers.

There is, Olson admits, an “enormous porn cluster”—and also a sizable, tight-knit one dedicated to My Little Pony—but there’s also hives of activity around music production, beer crafting, LGBT rights, hollywood starlets and current events. The one thing all those topics have in common? None of them sound very scummy after all.